Apple has just released iTunes 10.5, one day ahead of the release of the iOS 5. iTunes 10.5 is required for you to update your iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad’s OS when iOS 5 is released October 12th.

QuickTime on Snow Leopard is better than ever; lighter, faster and better for watching videos. But if QuickTime Player can’t open the movie, what good is it? Perian is a must-have tool that allows QuickTime to play many more formats, including (but not limited to) AVI, DIVX, FLV. An open-source program, it also works in any program that uses QuickTime, so with it you can watch a large number of file formats on Front Row.

Neil McAllister over at Developer World posted an interesting article regarding Apple’s forthcoming Grand Central technology. It is a great article (a little dense if you are not a hardcore techie), but I wonder if his conclusions are necessarily right.

QuickTime Pro has long been Apple’s paid upgrade to the QuickTime media player software, unlocking some minor features in the software such as video encoding, iSight / mic recording, and the ability to save videos from the Internet. It currently costs $29.99 for either the Windows or Mac version. The latest seeds of of Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard are suggesting that Apple may in fact be eliminating the QuickTime Pro upgrade entirely

Apple has released a QuickTime update for the new MacBooks, MacBook Pros and MacBook Airs. The update fixes some issues relating to playback of standard definition iTunes content.

We reported a few days ago that there are some iTunes playback issues with content from the iTunes Store on the new notebooks with displays that are not HDPC compliant, though it was not known exactly what content was protected.

Apple has released updates to Quicktime and Front Row in support of the new iTunes 8.

Quicktime 7.5.5 fixes a number of security issues. Front Row 2.1.6 improves compatibility with the new version of Quicktime and iTunes.

Details and links after the break.

Exibia, from Plyxim software, has just been upgraded to version 1.2. Exibia is a server video scheduling tool intended for schools and universities. With Exibia, the user can upload any video that is compatible with Quicktime to a central server, which is subsequently connected to the school’s closed circuit television system. The uploader of the more »

MacRumors just posted that a reader has found references to “iSight HD” in QuickTime system files.

For those who don’t know, the iSight, which is currently the branding of the camera integrated into all Macs with displays, used to be the name used for an external Firewire camera sold by Apple from 2003-2006. It was released to coincide with iChat AV, Apple’s next-generation video/audio chat application. In 2006, they stopped selling it, presumably because most Macs would have one built in, but seemingly overlooked the fact that if you bought a Mac Mini or Mac Pro, there was now no Apple option for a webcam. The Cinema Displays also do not contain an integrated iSight.

More after the break.

Yesterday, the US Patent & Trademark Office published Apple’s latest trademark, titled “Snow Leopard,” under application 7749408sn6. According to Apple’s Snow Leopard webpage, “The next major version of the world’s most advanced operating system, Mac OS X, changes more than its spots, it changes focus. Taking a break from adding new features, Snow Leopard—scheduled to more »

Apple has been granted four new patents today by the US Patent & Trademark Office. The patents cover four inventions that relate to Apple’s multipurpose dock, QuickTime’s transmission of differently formatted media, measuring network bandwidth between two computers, and a communication between media servers and media clients.

Stand invention (US Patent D567800) does not offer a detailed explanation as to why this dock is much different than other docks on the market. Apple only provided a one sentence explanation in the patent filing: “The stand, which can be utilized as a dock, is used to support an electronic device, such as a media player, media storage device, cellular phone, PDA and/or the like.”